Author: signalsfromtheedge

Nancy Kress is one of science fiction’s crown jewels. She is a writer of powerful science fiction, having won Hugos and Nebulas. She also is known as a talented writing teacher.

September’s issue of sf and fantasy magazine Galaxy’s Edgehas an insightful interview by the wildly talented author. To read her own personal thoughts on her career (and to access the full interview) you can click the magazine link to see the many options available for buying this wonderful 28th issue.

To whet your appetite here is an exclusive excerpt:

Joy Ward: How did you get started writing?

Nancy Kress: By accident. I had never planned on being a writer. When I was a child, I thought all writers were dead because the writers I was reading were Louisa May Alcott. I really did not realize that writing was a commodity that was still being produced. I thought it was like oil, there was a finite amount of it.

Then I discovered that there were actual writers living and this completely shocked me, but I come from a very conservative Italian-American family, and I grew up in the 1950s. So my mother sat me down when I was 12 and said, “Do you want to be a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary?” Because those were the only possible things she could think of, and I thought it over and I said, “Okay, I’ll be a teacher.” So I became a fourth grade teacher, and I was for four years. I enjoyed it. Then I got married and had my children. I was pregnant with my second child. We lived way out in the country. There were no other women at home. They were all older and had gone back to work. My then husband took our only car to work, and he was taking an MBA, so he often didn’t come home for dinner; he stayed for classes. I was there with my one-year-old- 18-month-year-old, very difficult pregnancy, and I was going nuts.

I started writing to have something to do that didn’t involve Sesame Street, and I didn’t take it seriously. It was a thing I was doing while the baby was napping, to try to have something of my own. I would send them out. They’d come back. I’d send them out they’d come back. After a year, one sold. After another year, a second one. After another year a third one sold, then it started to pick up and I began to take it more seriously, but I didn’t plan on doing this.

I remember (selling the first story) very well. It was to Galaxy, which is a magazine long-defunct. What I didn’t know is that everybody else had stopped submitting to Galaxy because it was trembling on the verge of bankruptcy. I had no connection with fandom. I didn’t know it existed, I didn’t know SFWA existed. I didn’t know conventions existed. When I first sold it, it turned out that nobody else was submitting anything, and they were desperate. So they published my story immediately then it went bankrupt. It took me three years to get my $105. I wanted it, and I kept writing and I’d say, “This is my first sale. I want my $105.” And for that eventually I think he had pity and he sent me the check.

I did it. I did that was what goes through my mind. Three words, “I did it.” I didn’t think I could, but I did it.

For many years science fiction got a really bad rap. It was fantastical fiction of no substance, a poor relation to literary fiction, or to any other kind of fiction (except maybe romance); it was often considered a flight of fancy. But mainstream readers are starting to realize that science fiction novels, TV shows and movies are often social commentary on the human condition. And not only that, they can often be thought-provoking and moving allegories of our current lives, helping us confront the parts of ourselves we probably need to work on and improve if we are ever to have a successful future as individuals or a species.

While SF movies have always evoked a sense of “what if” in terms of considering how we could end up if we made X choice instead of Y (The Planet of the Apes films are perfect examples of this!), when you read SF novels you are free to picture the future the author’s presents with your own imagination, often making the resulting lesson more profound.

So, who is the most influential SF author in your opinion? We’d love to find out whose writing affects our readers the most!

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate here. There are many people willing to raise their hands up when NASA asks, “Who wants to be one of the first 100 colonists of Mars?”, even knowing that means they are leaving all their loved ones behind, to go on what would certainly be very risky–possibly one way–trip to the red planet. When NASA introduced us to their newest Astronaut trainees last week, they all were emphatic when asked by a reporter if they would go, if asked.

But what if you were to find out that Earth was dying, in some irrevocable way that would most probably destroy the entire solar system. Would you be just as eager to be one of the very few people who could get on humanity’s Noah’s Arc, the only Starship leaving the solar system, in the hopes of finding a new world, knowing there was only a slim chance of success?

Or would you prefer to spend your last moments on Earth with loved ones, knowing you will certainly die, but being able to have the most time possible with friends and family before the end?

With either option, you lose your family, you lose your friends, regardless of what choice you make. Their lives are destined to become ashes in a destroyed Solar System. But you, you could have a chance to help humanity start anew in another star system, on another world. Is it worth the seemingly selfish choice to leave everyone else you love behind, to have the chance to start a new life, and ultimate a new family?

Humanity might technically survive with that second option, but will we lose our ability to be humane–something integral to our species’ identity.

With Wonder Woman (and the movie’s amazing lead, Gal Gadot) taking the world by storm, many a conversation has been surrounding how empowering it is to have a strong female protagonist presented as the main hero in a movie production, as well as it being the first comic-book-series-turned-to-movie helmed by a female director, Patty Jenkins. Whether you think the movie lives up to the hype or not, the most important factor to take home about the buzz created around this movie is how really important it is to girls and women to have strong female role models represented in a field once dominated by male protagonists.

We created this poll to find out who are the science fiction and fantasy women that inspire you. Not only can you select more than one answer out of the options, but you can add your own, too, if you thought our list was lacking. We’d love to hear from you!

The English language is acknowledged as being one of the most complicated languages to translate into other languages, along with Hindi, Korean, Icelandic and a host of others (depending on which particular set of statistics you look at). But did you know there are some weird and wonderful words that are unable to be translated at all?

No? Well, even more interesting is the reason why these words can’t be translated. No solo word in any other language represents the scope of the original word. Each of these words can usually only be translated using multiple words or a phrase.

A notable English word that fits the bill is Serendipity, which literally means fortunate accident, and has no direct translation in any other language. But there are some really fascinating words in other languages, too, that helps us realize how emotion-driven verbal and written forms of communication can be.

What if those precious nameless moments between a couple actually did have a word to describe them?

Who would think there was a word for the specific type of bad luck you can experience?

There are many untranslatable words that seem to focus on someone’s sense of being. While Litost in Czech describes the torment that is gained by being aware of how miserable your life is, there are other single words our their to describe a positive feeling. Hygge is that cozy feeling you get while you are sitting around a cozy fire with your loved ones, but my favorite, all-encompassing, untranslatable word is Gezellig.

There are many, many more examples of untranslatable words (the Italian even have a word for people addicted to the UV glow of tanning salons: Slampadato!), but one thing they all have in common is they show us that not matter who we are, we all have the same experiences over our lifetimes, and it behooves us to learn more about the fascinating languages around us that connect us to each other.

Kij Johnson is a Hugo winner, and a three-time Nebula winner (in consecutive years, yet!) and is acknowledged as one of the field’s leading short fiction writers. And this week, over at Galaxy’s Edge, Joy Ward interviews her about what it takes to be true to yourself as a writer:

“One of the most important things I ever say to my students is, everything else I teach them is just tactics, but the thing that I am always proudest of bringing up is: figure out why you’re writing. Really why you’re writing. Not, oh I have things worth saying or oh, I want to make a living or whatever it is. But really if you go all the way down deeper and deeper and deeper, like spend two years in therapy with a therapist every single Tuesday. So why do you write? Usually the answer is somewhere in early childhood. So it’s a little kid response. I’m not ascribing any value judgment to that. Because mine, when you get right down to it, is parents were sort of emotionally absent and when I wrote I didn’t get praised for my writing very much but I didn’t get praised for anything else. So my writing ultimately was a way of saying I’m not my mother and look at me to my parents. I also did a lot of art for the same reasons. That’s mine. We all have one, ultimately, underneath it all. Whatever we say in interviews usually is the cover up. It’s the pat response we use to cover up the sincere response. I do it because the only time anybody took me seriously as a 5’10” Amazon blonde was when I wrote and they didn’t know what I looked like. Because they stopped staring at my chest long enough it took to read my story. So there are so many responses and so many of them sound venal or petty or small or something like that. Those responses are not any of those things. Those responses are the heart that when we understand it gives us the spines that we build adulthood on. That’s what I always think of, so to me knowing that is the most important part of your writing cause if you know your reason for writing is because you’re competing with your dad and you didn’t know it. It’s like, as soon as you know that, now you can get away from writing your dad’s story or the stories that are going to school your dad about you and now you’re going to be able to tell the stories you want to tell. If you are doing it because you are insecure and you want people to look at you, that you’re smart or clever or cute or whatever it is, as soon as you know that, you are in control. Until you know it you don’t. So I’m always telling undergrads but especially adults because we get those super complicated defense mechanisms that allow us to never, ever look at ourselves. That’s fundamental. That’s my answer really. It’s fundamental that we understand who we are and our smallest, pettiest, most selfish or narcissistic or greedy, envious little pieces. We can either counter or use to our advantage and make them work.”

Go to the interview page of Galaxy’s Edge Magazine to read the rest of this wonderful interview!

Genetics can be a fascinating thing. What makes our eyes blue instead of brown? Our hair straight versus curly? Sometimes these answers are determined by the genes our parents pass down; some are determined by mutations in our chromosomes. . . .

More often than not, mutations are random, and so many can be negative. Here is a video showing mutations gone wrong:

It’s no surprise that most people, when they hear the word “mutation”, attribute a negative connotation to it (which is no surprise, given what we just saw in the video above). However, not all mutations are bad.

For example, if you click on this page, there is a description of four beneficial evolutionary mutations humans have developed. You will find out there is a mutation that lessons heart disease, prevents broken bones, makes you a lot more immune to malaria, or, as quoted below, even gives women–yes, apparently only women–the ability to see the world in more colors.

Tetrachromatic Vision

Most mammals have poor color vision because they have only two kinds of cones, the retinal cells that discriminate different colors of light. Humans, like other primates, have three kinds, the legacy of a past where good color vision for finding ripe, brightly colored fruit was a survival advantage.

The gene for one kind of cone, which responds most strongly to blue, is found on chromosome 7. The two other kinds, which are sensitive to red and green, are both on the X chromosome. Since men have only one X, a mutation which disables either the red or the green gene will produce red-green colorblindness, while women have a backup copy. This explains why this is almost exclusively a male condition.

But here’s a question: What happens if a mutation to the red or the green gene, rather than disabling it,shiftsthe range of colors to which it responds? (The red and green genes arose in just this way, from duplication and divergence of a single ancestral cone gene.)

To a man, this would make no real difference. He’d still have three color receptors, just a different set than the rest of us. But if this happened to one of a woman’s cone genes, she’d have the blue, the red and the green on one X chromosome, and a mutated fourth one on the other… which means she’d have four different color receptors. She would be, like birds and turtles, a natural “tetrachromat”, theoretically capable of discriminating shades of color the rest of us can’t tell apart. (Does this mean she’d see brand-new colors the rest of us could never experience? That’s an open question.)

And we have evidence that just this has happened on rare occasions. Inonestudyof color discrimination, at least one woman showed exactly the results we would expect from a true tetrachromat.

Imagine seeing the world, quite literally, in a different way to most humans on Earth.

Here is another website that lists 10 beneficial mutations (including several of the ones listed above), showing us that humans really do evolve to adapt to our climate (for the most part) or today’s very fast paced world. The webpost even mentions that certain individuals even have rare mutations that don’t necessarily help themselves, but definitely help others:

“Golden” Blood

While most of us are aware of the eight basic blood types (A, AB, B, and O—each of which can be positive or negative), there are currently 35 known blood group systems, with millions of variations in each system. Blood that doesn’t fall into the ABO system is considered rare, and those who have such blood may find it challenging to locate a compatible donor when in need of a transfusion.

Still, there’s rare blood, and then there’sreallyrare blood. Presently, the most unusual kind of blood is known as “Rh-null.” As its name suggests, it doesn’t contain any antigens in the Rh system. It’s not that uncommon for a person to lack some Rh antigens. For instance, people who don’t have the Rh D antigen have “negative” blood (e.g. A-, B-, or O-). Still, it’s extremely extraordinary for someone to not have a single Rh antigen. It’s so extraordinary, in fact, that researchers have only come across40 or so individualson the planet who have Rh-null blood.

What makes this blood even more interesting is that it totally beats O blood in terms of being a universal donor, since even O-negative blood isn’t always compatible with other types of rare negative blood. Rh-null, however, works with nearly any type of blood. This is because, when receiving a transfusion, our bodies will likely reject any blood that contains antigens we don’t possess. And since Rh-null blood has zero Rh, A, or B antigens, it can be given to practically everyone.

Unfortunately, there are only about nine donors of this blood in the world, so it’s only used in extreme situations. Because of its limited supply and enormous value as a potential lifesaver, some doctors have referred to Rh-null as “golden” blood. In some cases, they’ve even tracked down anonymous donors (a big no-no) to request a sample.

Those who have the Rh-null type undoubtedly have a bittersweet existence. They know that their blood is literally a lifesaver for others with rare blood, yet if they themselves need blood, their options are limited to the donations of only nine people.

So what does this tell us? That we’ve not only evolved from apes (so to speak) to become who we are today, but we’re still evolving to become something else in the future! Maybe we won’t develop mental powers like the mutants depicted in the X-Man franchise, but we already have our very own X-men in real life–and that is pretty darn amazing.

Meet humble Australian James Harrison. Because of his blood, and donating over 1100 times in half a century, this one man’s blood has saved over two million human lives–precious new born lives. He quite literally is a hero.

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